Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1088168
60 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2019 Matties: So, between factories one and two, what labor reduction do you have? Dudnikov: Maybe 20–30%, and the factory three has a 70%reduction. Factory Three: The Smart Factory Dudnikov concluded the tour with factory three—the new smart factory. Dudnikov: Now, in the smart factory, the first floor is drilling and lamination. Inner layer is on the second floor, and then finishing is on floors three through six. Each floor is basi- cally a separate factory setup in a serpentine process. The transfer between operations is mostly done with robots. As we get 100% of the intelligence system integrated, a customer will be able to go online, send us a job, and our system will automatically check whether we have material in stock, load that material, pull it out of stock, and release it to the floor within 30 minutes. In the smart factory alone, we have over 200 drilling machines, and that's only a small frac- tion of our total drilling capability. By mapping out the drill programs and using our intelligent manufacturing system software to optimize which job goes on which drilling machine, one operator can drive up to eight machines. We have both Hans Laser and Schmoll drilling ma- chines. We also have over 100 machines set up for back drilling, including some with CCD cameras. All of our machines are 200 KRPM spindles, six heads. Our standard panel is an oversized 24x28". Matties: Did you find that to be better for opti- mization? Dudnikov: Absolutely. That's how we get the cost down. In lamination, we have more than 12 Burkle full-sheet presses with 10 openings that are all oil heated. Loading the presses is all done by robots. Everything comes on rolls—prepreg, copper foil, etc.—and we do all our own sheeting and then goes into kitting for layup. Our tooling system provides extremely high tolerancing from layer to layer. If you com- bine that with predictive modeling on scaling, this gets us into much tighter registration ca- pabilities. Every laid-up stack goes through an X-ray process, so we can check whether some- thing was mislaid up, or if there's something significant and they could break it down and redo it all before committing to lamination. After lamination, we use X-ray drills to form the tooling holes for drilling. This is another area that we're focused on smart processes. These machines can measure internal targets, and what we're trying to do is develop pre- dictive models for scale factors because we're running such a variety of jobs and laminates. Do you know how many different materials there are in the market now? We want to be able to run jobs rather than run test panels. Smart drill room.